Category Archives: Homeland Security

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If by now you’re still unsure whether the White House is moving forcefully towards vicious totalitarianism then you haven’t been paying attention.

Some have gotten the message, though, and interpret it as a license to punish, dehumanize, and demoralize. This is essential for The Authoritarian Man, who finds security in obedience.

Jewish cemeteries have been vandalized. Jewish centers in Albuquerque; Baltimore; Birmingham, Ala.; Milwaukee; and Wilmington, Del., have reported repeated threats; jarring graffiti of swastikas have been reported on some college campuses as well as the New York City subway. Two Indian engineers were shot in Kansas. According to the New York Times’s John Eligon, Alan Blinder, and Nida Najar, “It raised new alarms about a climate of hostility toward foreigners in the United States, where President Trump has made clamping down on immigration a central plank of his ‘America first’ agenda.”

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for my mother, on her 91st birthday, 12/19, who tells me she wishes she were 30 so that she could once again teach kids about this world today and take to the streets

“I don’t know. I don’t think I can go to study abroad in Paris,” she says and hesitates and grins.

When she sits across from me, her shoulders are barely higher than my desktop. Her hijab frames her face perfectly: wide, inquisitive, dark eyes that are alive, dancing, penetrating; high cheekbones; her lips are full and when she smiles she gets small creases at the sides of her mouth that resemble ripples edging from the shore of a serene lake.

I ask why not?, though I know the answer: She’s from Sierra Leone and a Muslim.

“Even when I flew to Kenya,” she continues, still smiling, “the police at the airport stopped me — it was very scary — because they thought I was Somali. No one is safe — no one that looks like me. An African Muslim.”

She giggles a bit, this time as if to call attention to the tragic irony of it all.

This young woman, but nineteen, left her family and traveled from Sierra Leone to Hong Kong to the United States to the state of Vermont andMiddlebury College for an education. She’s earned scholarships all the way. She’s brilliant and will undoubtedly do great things in the future.

But reality is harsh; the world she — and all of us, really — navigate is dark, foreboding, threatening, many parts forbidden.

How then do we justify this world to our students? What do we tell her? Where’s opportunity now?

What is the educator’s role in addressing the harsh reality that not everyone has the right and capacity to move about freely in what we still falsely call the free world?

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“What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance” (1839-1840)

We are more at home with illusion than we are with the reality before us. It seems quite natural for us to walk away from facts when they don’t support our illusions — and our emotional attachments to them. Our minds and our eyes always fool us. We even reject the notion that they do — a catch 22 if there ever was one.

Consider this: Why does the moon look so much bigger when it is near the horizon?

Most scientists agree that the reason the moon looks bigger is purely in our minds. Our mind interprets the things we see in interesting ways.

Like facts.

One theory about the moon illusion says that when the moon is near the horizon we perceive it to be farther away from us than when it is high in the sky. But since the moon is actually the same size, our minds make it look bigger when it is near the horizon to compensate for the increased distance.

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Granada, Spain — The modern state comes into being during the Middle Ages in Europe. It establishes what many economists call a social good, a strong military that (a) provides security for citizens, (b) gives room for nationalism, and (c) implements accountability. We have the right to live securely and without fear, the right to define a national identity, and to create the means by which to expand fortunes, guided by laws. The Modernaccountable State, there it is. And it’s all held together by taxation — people pay for protection, pay for nationalism, and pay for laws.

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The image on the left is the prophetic shot of Don DeLillo’s great novel, Underworld. Published in 1997, the Underworld was immediately recognized as one of the best American novels ever written – in fact, recently, viewed in the top 5. Post 9/11 readers by the droves were drawn, first, to the ominous cover, second, to the narrative’s harrowing picture of American culture, the world, and where we might find some semblance of hope – or not. Somewhere between our waste and commodification, we struggle for hope, for a better future. Peace, as DeLillo ends his novel.

The image on the right was just captured by my son, Carlos, a professional photographer living in Brooklyn, NY. In many ways, Carlos’ image is also a memorial – to the days of DeLillo picture, to the harrowing events of 9/11, and to our current malaise and sense of hope and vulnerability.

Carlos’ image is very much a vulnerable one: will we experience 9/11 again? Given the conditions in our world, are we, like this image, in a fog we can’t get out of? Is this a memorial to a time we’ll never get back, yet we hope for something more?

This piece was sent to me anonymously. It was written by an old colleague, Javier Sicard, now diseased. It’s a piece that now resides in a yet to be published book on the story of how the tri-border region, Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, along the Iguazu falls, became a nexus for terrorism’s easy border crossing. Sicard was visiting the area and following new investments in the region. In fact, after 9/11, when I visited the AMIA, in Buenos Aires, I was told that the CIA immediately visited them to inquire about what they new about this porous border.

I, here, copy the entire piece by Javier Sicard, once a noted scholar, A New Consolidation of Power. What do you make of it?

A New Consolidation of Power

Javier Sicard November 30, 1995

Since the Cold War (1947-93), there has been an increasingly open cohabitation between the corporation and the state. As the state’s ambitions have grown more expansive and more global, corporate economic muscle has become its basis of power, a reliable strength that, in the minds of governments, assures dominance. The corporation is the main sponsor and coordinator of the powers represented by science and technology – a way to dominate. These unprecedented alliances – and combinations – are challenging established political, moral, intellectual, and economic boundaries; they are re-inventing and disseminating culture – and notions of pleasure, privacy, and consumption, eagerly creating a politically passive citizen. We find ourselves slowly transcending into an imperial culture that is less democratic, less republican in the eighteenth century sense.

Nowhere are these new alliances more noticeable then in the University. The University has literally been transformed. Up until now, the University’s raison d’être has been to determine and nurture the national cultural mission; however, given the state’s ambitions and the corporation’s predatory nature, new alliances with governments, in the US and Europe, have definitively separated the University from the idea of the nation-state. The University is a different kind of institution, no longer linked to the destiny of the nation-state, and a powerful protector of economic globalization, which brings with it a relative decline in the nation-state as a prime instance of the reproduction of capital around the world. The University is complicit in creating a world where the nation-state is governed by the corporation. Those of us who are the professors in the University have been relegated to nothing more than administrators producing yet more able bodied managers that will enter into the different nodes made available by the flow of global capital. We are like a concierge in a grand hotel ushering guests towards new luxuries. We are the gatekeepers to the moneyed gentry – nothing but policemen cleaning up the next wave of managers that will maintain all our systems as they are. The University, today, is no different then AT&T, McDonald Douglas, Triad Management – or any other Wall Street enterprise fixated on excellence (read: efficiency) and accountability. The University cleans money; it takes it in, allocates it to fund managers, that in turn reap their own rewards from the exchange of capital, after which they return a healthy profit for the University. The University is another way to move wealth. It’s quiet. It’s unseen, masked by its mythological – and historical – past. The centrality of the humanistic disciplines are no longer assured in the University; accounting and management are the new guides that acquiesce to new and dynamic systems of power, control and discipline.

The historical project for the University, a legacy of the Enlightenment, is the historical project of culture. The University is no longer a participant in this project. We may be witnessing the end of the University as traditionally known. The aim of the University is to indoctrinate its participants into the deep structure of postmodern industrialization; that is, the project is to industrialize thought. No critiques from the left, no one from the boundaries is allowed in. The University ensures that the illusion of the truth – now called reality – is widely accepted. Stripped of its grand narrative, the University’s overall mission is not cultural, it is corporate. It is a conduit integrating individuals to industry, accomplished by becoming depositories (think endowments) of global capital. In this relationship, Universities have become banks that answer to Wall Street, for starters, and must acquiesce to the whims of an ideology synonymous with corporatism. This is a great leap backwards, a denial of a growing imbalance which leads to our adoration of self-interest and our denial of public good, as my friend John Ralston Saul likes to say.

This new concentration of power has evolved into a society-dominating technocracy; in this brave new world, we in the University teach that management is, indeed, doing. New communication technologies are canonized, financial speculation is praised – and promoted – and we glorify the service economy. Consequently, we interiorizing an artificial vision of civilization that comes from hundreds of specialized sectors that carefully measure outcomes. Truth, therefore, does not exist since it is measured by professionals while citizens are busy interiorizing a synthetic world that really doesn’t exist and liable to break apart at any moment.

War is common place and widely supported by these powerful relationships. The massive killing of people is a sort of efficiency model; and greed, the prodigal child of hyperindividualism, is systematically created and delivered from one world to the next, from the First World to the Third World; it’s our outreach, our foreign policy. That means that some worlds – take Latin America, for instance, where my own country, Argentina, can serve as an example – exist to be conduits for this greed, facilitating it, enabling insincere transactions that, in order for these to come to fruition, a certain part of the population must be de-humanized, marginalized, sent off into an existence marked by nomadism, a new reality for the weak and the poor, the disenfranchised that are made to run from depravation, famine, and violence and towards simple subsistence found elsewhere, sometimes only on the side of a desolate road to nowhere.

The new consolidation of power makes us vulnerable, not more secure, though we’re lead to believe that everything is just dandy, going along smoothly. We’re better off, we are told. Yet we find ourselves more susceptible to everything from diseases (some unknown) to terrorism to climate change and environmental degradation, the mechanical fluctuations of machines that run global markets.

We can lay blame for this world on the doorsteps of the most elite Universities, and we can lay blame, here, to the most accomplished minds that have created an allegiance with the predatory nature of corporatism, the mechanism by which power has been consolidated and government made to serve it, not us. The University is the newest member to this world order. The University is the entry level institution to this new consolidation of power.

Strictly re-reporting about a program I heard yesterday, on Here & Now, since I’ve talked about surveillance before: “Is it possible that your cable and phone companies are watching you at home? The technology already exists to allow those companies to watch us, and the information they could get from that could help advertisers target us.”

This, of course, is amazing and very uncomfortable for all of us, indeed. What’s most uncomfortable – perhaps we have grown to accept this – is the evolving relationship between major corporations and government (another subject I’ve spoken about). In this case – surveillance via tv – major corporations – Verizon and Comcast – are working very hard to watch us be ourselves in the privacy of our own homes.